In software engineering and hardware engineering, serviceability (also known as supportability) refers to the ability of technical support personnel to install, configure, and monitor computer products, identify exceptions or faults, debug or isolate faults to root cause analysis, and provide hardware or software maintenance in pursuit of solving a problem and restoring the product into service. Incorporating serviceability facilitating features typically results in more efficient product maintenance, reduces operational costs, and maintains business continuity.
On standard desktop environments with ample bandwidth and processing power, serviceability tasks tend to “over-gather” information and filter the information later during data analysis. Desktop environments have a tendency to retain little or no information between various information gathering requests, thus incurring extra bandwidth and processing resources. This “grab it all and sort it later” approach is impractical for mobile devices where processing capacity and bandwidth is limited.